Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff

complete excess or total impairment, but more than she would have liked. The few times she had raised it, his defensiveness had immediately backed her down.
    On a girls’ weekend last fall, after too much wine, she had admitted to her college roommate that she’d married a simple man, an uncomplicated person. She had been looking for dependability, she’d confided, but instead had found a boy, the kind of person who would have a predictably complacent approach to life. He had proposed to the girl from the next town, stepped into his father’s insurance business, and met his high school friends weekly at the same bar. In the early days of their marriage Maura had fit into Pete’s life with ease, conforming herself to his lifestyle. But routine, complacency, and the lack of spontaneity had begun to chafe over the years. It was like wanting something more or somehow different but having no real idea quite what, she had told her college roommate.
    Maura had regretted spilling this confidence to her friend the next morning, blushing at the thought of such naked honesty. But they had not discussed it again, and she told herself that the alcohol had probably blunted the memory of the conversation.
    She lay back in the sand, turning her face toward the weak warmth of the sun. A few larger pebbles dug into her back, and she raised her eyes up to the cloudless sky. Even before Maura had completely put a finger on her growing restlessness, felt the daily routine sanding down and blurring her edges, she had understood how easily attentions could be diverted. In her early marriage, there had been a couple of temptations. Well, flirtations really, that had stayed with her all of these years later. When she was newly engaged to Pete, she and her girlfriend Beth Stevens had gone to a Sox game together. The first welcome tendrils of a spring breeze had begun to stir over the plains and off the Great Lakes, lending a recklessness to the premature warmth of the afternoon. Emboldened by the beers in the stands, they’d been stealing glances and giggling at the three boisterous guys seated next to them. Very quickly it had bloomed into playful flirting.
    Tim was the name of the young man next to her, and he’d been more serious than his buddies, more animated and eager to talk. She’d let him rest his hand on her knee as they conversed, a small, harmless thing, she had told herself later, because she was, after all, only engaged and not married. They’d discussed music and politics and family. While they stole sidelong glances at the field, she had the feeling that the space around them on the bleachers had shrink-wrapped them both in, so that the sounds surrounding them, the cheering and the whooping it up, had begun to recede.
    Beth poked her thigh at one point and gave her a strange, almost imploring look, which, she realized through her slightly beery haze, was meant to pull her back to earth. And it was only after both of them were back on the commuter train and headed out to the suburbs that she thought about how quickly she had attached herself to this person and had spoken so readily and intimately. It had struck her, later that night, that her conversations with Pete, even in the early days of their courtship, had a different feeling, not as earnest or intense.
    During those two and a half hours at the baseball game a total stranger had lit her up and provoked an examination of the conventions and beliefs with which she’d been raised. He was Jewish, she recalled, and he had probed her feelings about her Catholicism as a woman and challenged her very orthodox decision to simply vote Republican because her parents did. Tim’s sense of intellectual engagement in life had seemed electric, and that, in turn, had kindled a palpable mutual attraction, as if they’d both been illuminated from within.
    And although she had never seen Tim again or even learned his last name, this one, vivid encounter had popped into her head at odd